Fraternity Kitchen

Chef Thing

Saturday, March 28th, 2009 | daily | No Comments

“Be sure to try the risotto,” a friend had quipped when I told him we were dining at Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s as part of my Spring Break Eat London trip.  Anyone who follows Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares will have the impression that he is fond of risotto.  Really fond.  That wasn’t an option, but we did get the personal attention of a dead ringer for the charming French maitre’d who whips the front of house into shape on Hell’s Kitchen, along with about four waiters, not including the crumb sweeper.  Filling out the Customs form on the flight back, I listed my purchases…Cookbooks, Chocolate, Crackers, Tea…Salt.  I hesitated about listing the last one, but was afraid to not report it; even I saw how weird it might seem to a Customs officer to discover 4 boxes of undeclared smoked Maldon sea salt.  It’s a chef thing.

Professional Development

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 | daily | 3 Comments

I tried not to give “that look” as Phil discussed beer options with the waitress.  It wasn’t the liquor; it was that he had just ordered wild cherry pancakes and there are Rules about food and wine/beer matching.  If he had ordered, say, the rabbit terrine, well, that would have been just fine.  But when it arrived, I thought it looked like my guys’ sort of thing and I pulled out my camera.  “You’re not going to take pictures of the food, are you?” he had asked the night before when I told him the whole point of this trip is to eat, for professional development of course.  And I had said no, but pancakes and beer had Fraternity Kitchen written all over it. 

http://www.thenaturalkitchen.com/

http://www.turningearth.co.uk/thepigsear/thepigsear.htm

Spring Break Fever

Friday, March 20th, 2009 | daily | No Comments

“You haven’t been my cover guy for ages,” I told Zach during finals week.  Unshaven, hair unkempt, sleep deprived…he was the perfect poster boy.  It always seems to be the case at the end of a quarter that things fall apart.  Our dishwasher remained virtually unusable for the last three days and trying to feed 61 guys without it was so stressful that the time has seemed interminable.  A couple of weeks ago, feeling down and uninspired–and having saved for it for ages–I finally booked a trip to London for Phil and me.  And so this week he told me that he supposed by Thursday I would not be caring about work.  That’s not true, but as it happens on Thursday I was chatting with Dan about boarding my cats at the vet while I put some boiled eggs into a bag to leave in the guys fridge.  I intended to write “Boiled Eggs” on the bag, but wrote “Vet” instead.  It’s time for a break.

Spending Spree

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 | daily | 3 Comments

This is Stan trying to find a part for our dishwasher which yesterday decided to spray it’s contents on the lunch dish guys.  They were thrilled because this excused them from wash detail, but less thrilled when they realized this also meant no “home” cooked food.  There are days as dull as a parking lot attendant’s and then there are the ones where Dan looks at me and says, “this is a post.”  Here he is on the phone and you would think from the concern on his face that he too is trying to find a part, but no, he’s just having difficulty ordering a gazillion pizzas to be delivered to a frat house.  With his chef’s debit card.  And you can sort of understand the skepticism, but I suppose Dan’s earnest voice got through because he eventually returned to the kitchen with a total for me.  Now, I will be reimbursed, but still…I should have been prepared for a shock when he wrote it down rather than telling me and then ran out of the kitchen before I could get him to explain just exactly how someone spends $500 on pizza.  I’m expecting to hear glowing reports on the foie gras and caviar toppings when I check in tomorrow.

Job Description

Sunday, March 15th, 2009 | daily | 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, when I had been particularly unbearable, I sent Kirk and his boss a link to despair.com, a company that produces parodies of motivational posters.  The particular poster I linked them to was:  “APATHY:  If we don’t take care of the customer, maybe they’ll stop bugging us.”  I followed that with:  “CUSTOMER DISSERVICE:  Because we’re not satisfied until you’re not satisfied.”  I didn’t hear back for a couple of days after that one, but I expected to receive a link to the blogging poster:  http://www.despair.com/blogging.html

And I would have laughed, because I often do feel that way.  But then I get an email like the one yesterday from ”Jennifer” in Atlanta who is applying for a fraternity chef position this week and had questions.  It made me reflect on what my job actually is.  Brian texted me three times this weekend, once to tell me that, after failing to get a part in Hair, a subsequent audition had gone well, and again to let me know he had two parts in another show.  And then a third time to tell me the dates.  I was touched by this because despite the fact that I am hard on these guys–some might occasionally have a stronger word for it–they know I’m genuinely interested in their lives.  There’s a job description in my contract that I could send to prospective chefs like “Jennifer”, but forget that…if you’re not prepared for off-hours texts, applying bandages and hearing more than you want to know about the private lives of college men, this is not for you.

Gentlemen’s Club

Thursday, March 12th, 2009 | daily | No Comments

I snap photos all the time at work and some of them just seem to capture a real moment.  This is one of those: Perry (who is now a financial advisor with MetLife) talking to Newman who will head into his senior year in a few months.  Perry remains attached to me even though I say deflating things like, “must be hard to be a financial advisor these days, what with Madoff about to be sentenced to everlasting hell.”  Earlier in the day, I had a new driver deliver my goods and he asked me, “how did you end up in this gentlemen’s club?”  I found this question amusing on so many levels.  Later, he pressed me on it, “no, really…how did you get here?”  Like this wasn’t an act of free will on my part.  Like I was kidnapped from a restaurant and forced into the dark underworld of fraternity kitchen slavery.  “I applied,” I said.  “I brought pot roast and twice-baked potatoes to my interview.”  Not quite the salacious answer he was clearly hoping for.

Dazed and Confused

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 | daily | 1 Comment

Brian entered the kitchen as I was slicing the pot roast to tell me that he’s auditioning for “Hair” tonight.  And then he asked, “who are your favorites?”  I don’t know what prompted the question and I was going to give that Mom answer about how I love you all the same, but I answered truthfully, “I like the ones who come talk to me.”  Not quite buying it, he pressed on, “if the house were on fire, which ten would you save first?”  “Well, I do adore the freshmen.  Corey is great.”  And then I remembered.  “Oh shit, Corey.”  He had come in at 2:30 to ask for some turkey because he has class on Tuesdays during lunch.  It was a simple request and I told him I would get it, but at the time I was busy torturing Kirk and I guess at some point he had given up on me and left the kitchen.  So there I was telling Brian about one of my favorites whom I had starved today.  “I think I’m getting Alzheimer’s,” I mused to Dan and Newman as they watched t.v.  Without looking away from the set, Dan assured me that, no, if it were Alzheimer’s I wouldn’t remember who Corey is or what happened to his lunch.  And then Newman added, “gotta lay off the weed, Darlene.”  It was a joke, of course, and no drug test required because the boys will back me up on this:  I like to be in complete and absolute control at all times.

Real World

Sunday, March 8th, 2009 | daily | 1 Comment

It was pizza on Friday and while making my own sauce seemed reasonable and desirable, when I told a friend I’d made my own dough, I got that “oh yeah, you would do that” ribbing.  But it was easy and they really did notice the difference.  I wasn’t planning to post today.   Every time the narcissism of writing a blog starts to trouble me, I get a call from someone wanting to know when the next post is coming.  It happened this weekend, but my answer was different.   It was a dark week.  It’s not just that we keep trading viruses around here, or that finals loom or that the seniors don’t want to graduate into this particular real world.  It’s that there was an unexpected death of a parent, which shocked us  and brought echoes of an earlier loss here and made everything, especially this blog, seem trivial.  Then as now, cooking is the only thing I know to do and it’s what I was doing Friday, feeding the guys homemade pizzas before some of them headed out in mourning suits.

Care and Concern

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | daily | No Comments

I didn’t tell them it was my birthday, but someone must have sent out a mass text because it went from just an ordinary day to a mass love-in culminating in a bouquet and a really rather excellent choice of wine.  But just before dinner, at my most busy, freshman Jake showed up with a steak and a lobster tail in his hands.  Not for me…for him.  “Can I keep this in your fridge or freezer?” he asked.  I reminded him that they have their own freezer and he was about to head down there when he said, “is it okay to freeze this?”  He handed me the lobster tail, which was marked “previously frozen raw.”  “Well, no,” I said, “you can’t re-freeze it and because it’s raw, you need to cook it ASAP.”  It was 15 minutes before I was supposed to be out the door on my birthday, but there was no way I was letting him hold that thing.  I put a pot of salted, seasoned water on to boil and then it slowly dawned on me.  He’d bought that thing at noon.  He was asking me about refrigeration at nearly five.  “Jake,” I said, “where has this lobster tail been all day?”  I almost forgot to take my garbage out when I left work and that would have made for an interesting odour in the morning, a rotting disguarded lobster tail that had spent the previous afternoon sitting at room temperature in Jake’s bedroom like a neglected pet.

American Fish

Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | daily | 3 Comments

“I’m just the driver,” Alex said to me when I railed, “have you ever heard of a Chinese Sockeye?”  When my delivery came today, I noticed the “wild sockeye salmon” I had ordered was a product of China.  This is Seattle and, I don’t know, I thought it was reasonable to assume that a major west coast product labled “wild” would be from this continent.  So I told Alex to take it back and Kirk called a broker to find me some American fish.  It wasn’t that hard and the price is only slightly more.  You don’t have to be deeply into food politics to get this;  a little search on food safety in China produces appetizing subject headings like “Soy Sauce made from Human Hair.”  Now I will admit a bias here:  I first gained my loathing for Chinese fish production when I saw them flooding my native Louisiana with cheap crawfish, putting local fishermen out of work.  I know times are hard, but the thing is:  that shit tastes BAD.  I was watching the guys on the basketball court today and I was thinking about how much they care about their weight and their health and yet one of them asked me today if I they could ”get cheaper food” at Costco.  Well, maybe, I thought, but you’d have to find another chef.